On the Fourth of July, Hugh agrees to drive out to Mrs. LaMonte's house to get "the explosives," as he likes to call them. Halfway there, coming out of a long silence, his sister corrects him: they aren't explosives, she says. They're just fireworks. Toys. Hugh keeps both hands near the top of the steering wheel the way cautious men often do, and he does not turn to argue with her, not at first. He watches the panorama of drought colors go by for a full minute before he says, very quietly, "Yes. I know that."
"What? What do you know?" Dorsey sits slouched on the passenger side, her bare feet raised and crossed at the ankles on the leatherette dashboard, her arms wrapped around her knees, a compact circular mass.
"I know they're not explosives," he says. "Although they do explode. I was being ironic."
"Oh," she says. This time she is the one who lets the minute go by. Then she says, "That's unusual," and they both smile to themselves, gazing in different directions at the highway and the broad landscape of dried roadside grass and wilting crops.
June, a hot and rainless month, had paled the natural greens in the fields outside Five Oaks to a faded pastel in which the yellow is now, at the beginning of July, beginning to be visible. The corn stalks are stunted, and each tree leaf has its own coating of dust. In the heat the sky is an ashy stagnant blue. Dorsey's son, Noah, a deaf child, sits in the back and is sweating so much that his sportshirt is darkened with blotches. He is spinning a soccer ball on his index finger and rhythmically kicking the back of his mother's bucket seat. Without turning around, Dorsey makes the sign for stop it in the air above her head: right hand chopping into the palm of the left. The second time she does it, her hand motions rise in volume to a pantomime shout.
The car smells of hot leather and the lotion Hugh has spread that morning over his sunburned legs. A showroom salesman, he seldom encounters the sun directly, and when he does, especially on holidays and weekends, he sits in it as blank-faced as a lizard. Dorsey points down at her brother's legs, taking her gaze off the fields. "Why don't you ever remember about sunburn?" she asks.
"Pain makes no impression on me."